Design and construction of an experimental pervious paved parking area to harvest reusable rainwater

Pervious pavements are sustainable urban drainage systems already known as rainwater infiltration techniques which reduce runoff formation and diffuse pollution in cities. The present research is focused on the design and construction of an experimental parking area, composed of 45 pervious pavement parking bays. Every pervious pavement was experimentally designed to store rainwater and measure the levels of the stored water and its quality over time. Six different pervious surfaces are combined with four different geotextiles in order to test which materials respond better to the good quality of rainwater storage over time and under the specific weather conditions of the north of Spain. The aim of this research was to obtain a good performance of pervious pavements that offered simultaneously a positive urban service and helped to harvest rainwater with a good quality to be used for non potable demands.     

Topological Active Models optimization with Differential Evolution

The Topological Active Model is an active model focused on segmentation tasks. It provides information about the surfaces and the inside of the detected objects in the scene. The segmentation process turns into a minimization task of the energy functions which control the model deformation. In this work we propose a new optimization method of the segmentation model that uses Differential Evolution as an alternative evolutionary method that minimizes the decisions of the designer with respect to others such as genetic algorithms. Moreover, we hybridized Differential Evolution with a greedy search to integrate the advantages of global and local searches at the same time that the segmentation speed is improved. We also included in the local search the possibility of topological changes to perform a better adjustment in complex surfaces, topological changes that introduce the necessary mechanism to divide the mesh in the case of the presence of several objects in the scene.     

Identification and mapping of the Amazon habitats using a mixing model

A methodology is described for identifying and mapping floodplain habitats in a reach of the Amazon mainstream. A linear mixing approach was used to determine the fraction of three pure endmembers. This method was tested for two radiometrically rectified Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) scenes and the proportions of endmembers were used to identify the following classes: (1) clear/mixed water; (2) turbid water; (3) flooded non-forest; (4) flooded forest; (5) human settlements and (6) aquatic vegetation. The results were compared to visually interpreted Landsat TM images.     

Modelling of a Utility Boiler Using Parallel Computing

A mathematical model for the simulation of the turbulent reactive flow and heat transfer in a power station boiler has been parallelized. The mathematical model is based on the numerical solution of the governing equations for mass, momentum, energy and transport equations for the scalar quantities. The k- model and the conserved scalar/prescribed probability density function formalism are employed. Radiative heat transfer is calculated using the discrete ordinates method. The code has been fully parallelized using the spatial domain decomposition approach and MPI. Calculations were performed using an IBM-SP2. It is shown that the computational requirements are reduced and the parallel efficiency increases if the mean temperature and density are calculated a priori, and stored. The role of the different parts of the code on the parallel performance is discussed. A speedup of 5.9 is achieved using 8 processors.     

Gestational meconium: a sign of poor neonatal prognosis

Seventy five pregnancies where the presence of antepartum meconium was detected by transabdominal amniocentesis, were compared with 224 cases showing clear amniotic fluid (A.F.). The statistical differences were analized in terms of data of anamnesis, diseases complicating pregnancy, gestational age, fetal maturity diagnosis from the A.F. study, oxytocin test, labor characteristics, perinatal mortality and neurologic morbidity during the first nine months of life. The results suggest that the presence of antepartum meconium implies an increase in fetal risk, demanding an adequate analysis of the obstetric solutions, which is discussed.     

Changes in wine yeast storage carbohydrate levels during preadaptation,rehydration and low temperature fermentations

The metabolism of glycogen and trehalose was analysed in a wine yeast strain fermenting at 25 and 13 degrees C. Trehalose and glycogen degradation were completed during the lag phase of fermentation. Ammonia was taken up rapidly and once it had been reduced to negligible amounts, the synthesis of trehalose started. Glycogen followed a similar pattern. If trehalose synthesis was taken as a stress indicator, the fermentation at 13 degrees C could not be considered stressful because the maximum concentrations are similar at both temperatures. In industrial fermentations, and after a preadaptation in grape must for several hours at 18 degrees C, the lag phase was reduced significantly, and this may be why trehalose and glycogen were completely depleted at the beginning of the low temperature fermentation. Various preadaptation conditions were tested so that their influence on trehalose and glycogen degradation could be determined. The presence of fermentable carbon sources, such as glucose or fructose, triggered the mobilisation and use of trehalose. However, just increasing the osmotic pressure did not reduce the trehalose content. No such differences were observed in glycogen metabolism.     

Reference spectra to classify Amazon water types

Reference spectra extracted from spectral libraries can distinguish different water types in images when associated with limnological information. In this study, we compiled available databases into a single spectral library, using field water reflectance spectra and limnological data collected by different researchers and campaigns in the Amazonian region. By using an iterative clustering procedure based on the combination of reflectance and optically active components (OACs), reference spectra representative of the major Amazonian water types were defined from this library. Differences between the resultant limnological classes were also evaluated by paired t-tests at significance level 0.05. Finally, reference spectra were tested for Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) classification of waters in Hyperion/Earth Observing-One (EO-1) and Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS)/Environment Satellite (Envisat) images acquired simultaneously as the field campaigns. Results showed highly variable concentrations of OACs due to the complexity of the Amazonian aquatic environments. Ten classes were defined to represent this complexity, broadly grouped into four limnological characteristics: clear waters with low concentrations of OACs (class 1); black waters rich in dissolved organic carbon (DOC) (class 2); waters with large concentrations of inorganic suspended solids (ISSs) (classes 3–7); and waters dominated by chlorophyll-a (chl-a) (classes 8–10). Using the ten reference spectra, SAM classification of the field water curves produced an overall accuracy of 86% with the highest values observed for classes 3, 4, 6 and 7 and the lowest accuracy for classes 1 and 2. The results of paired t-tests confirmed the class differences based on the concentrations of OACs. SAM classification of the Hyperion and MERIS images using ground truth information resulted in overall classification accuracies of 48% and 67%, respectively, with the highest errors associated with specific portions of the scenes that were not adequately represented in the spectral library.